JournalistJeremy Scahill chases down the truth about Dirty Wars'

With controversy about drones and targeted killings regularly topping the news, “Dirty Wars” might be the summer’s timeliest film.

Shot over the course of three years, the documentary follows Jeremy Scahill, the national security correspondent for The Nation magazine, as he investigates covert wars overseen by both the CIA and JSOC (the Joint Special Operations Command) in countries around the globe from Yemen to Somalia to Afghanistan.

As far as Scahill is concerned, there is no such thing as a clean war. “I think the White House, under President Obama, has convinced a lot of peoples that his War on Terror is a clean war,” said Scahill, the author of the best-selling “Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Arm.” “But, from my experience on the ground, that simply is not true.”

One of 16 documentaries selected for competition at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, “Dirty Wars” earned rave reviews when in premiered in Park City, Utah. Film Comment described the doc as “sobering” while The Hollywood Reporter called it “a vital, gripping film” and Variety said it was “an astonishingly hard-hitting … persuasively researched pic.”

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While the film, which is now playing in Philadelphia, has a lot to say about clandestine wars, it occasionally plays like thriller, with Scahill risking his life to travel to tiny, isolated villages to interview both heavily guarded warlords and the families of bombing victims.

The idea for the movie took root a few years ago while Scahill was reporting on the war in Afghanistan. Along with the movie’s director Richard Rowley, Scahill became fascinated with a series of secret nighttime raids conducted by Special Operations Forces in rugged regions where war correspondents weren’t allowed to travel.

One such raid in Gardez, Afghanistan was responsible for the deaths of two pregnant women. With a cameraman in tow, Scahill set out for the Taliban-controlled province to interview the families of the women in hopes of putting a human face on those deemed “collateral damage.”

Over the course of the movie, Scahill argues that President Omaha has escalated the War on Terror but, unlike President Bush before him, is rarely held accountable for his actions.

“If a Republican was in office doing this stuff, I’d think you’d hear a lot more about it from liberals,” said Scahill, 38. “One of the reasons I think is more dangerous under Obama is because of who he is.

“Obama is a constitutional law professor who won the Nobel Peace Prize, a popular Democratic president legitimizing some of the things many of us found utterly distasteful about his predecessor’s policies. That’s what is really frightening about it.”

The middle part of “Dirty Wars” details the targeted killing of terrorist Anwar Al Awlaki, who was an American citizen. Initially, after 9/11, Al Awlaki spoke out against violence and was viewed as a moderate Muslim cleric. But he eventually became radicalized and was often described as “the next Bin Laden.”

Scahill is not opposed to bringing Al-Awlaki to justice but, as he notes in the movie, he believes the killing of Al-Awlaki crosses a line.

“Look, I’m willing to concede that everything that was said about in the press is true, and that he is involved in all kinds of terror plots. But for me the question is, ‘why not indict him? Why not charge him with a crime?’

“The reason I said we crossed a line with Al-Awlaki is because I think it gets to the question of how we value ourselves as a society. Are we judged for how we treat law-abiding citizens and the most powerful, or are we judged by how we treat the most reprehensible?

“What supposedly sets us apart is that we’re governed by the rule of law and our basic sets of freedoms. But if in some cases we’re going to say, `the mob can get the pitchforks and go after this guy,’ then we should stop claiming we’re the country we are.”

During recent hearings for the nomination of John Brennan as CIA director, Republicans Pat Toomey and Rand Paul filibustered in hopes that President Obama would settle the matter of whether or not the government has the right to use drones to shoot U.S. citizens on American soil. (The answer is no).

While Scahill is at odds with many of Paul and Toomey’s positions, he applauds their determination to set the record straight about drones.

“They entered in the Congressional record some of the best reporting on the issue of ,” said Scahill. “It’s shameful that Democrats hadn’t done it.”

Scahill insists that politics should have nothing to with objections to the current administration’s use of drone warfare.

“Remember when George Ryan was governor of Illinois and he issued a moratorium on the death penalty. Why did he do that? It wasn’t because he suddenly became a flaming member of Amnesty International. He did that because so many prisoners were exonerated by DNA evidence, and he realized he was sending people to death who weren’t guilty.

“So he put a moratorium on the death penalty. In a way that’s analogous to where we are right now with drones. When we don’t know who we’re killing maybe its time to step back. Maybe we should take a tally of who’ve we killed before we continue the killing game.”

Scahill resists the notion that the use of drones saves the lives of American military personnel. In fact, he sayid, before drones are deployed, there are many Americans on the ground in countries like Afghanistan and Yemen gathering intelligence.

“There are still covert units painting targets, as it is called, or looking for targets,” noted Scahill.

But, as he makes clear in the movie, Scahill’s biggest objection to drone warfare is future blowback. He argues that further down the road, there will be a considerable price to pay for today’s policies.

“One of the ways that Al Qaeda is recruiting in Yemen in by using our drone strikes…because of the fact that we’ve done a number of attacks which have killed innocent civilians…You’re forced to come to the conclusion that we’re making more new enemies than we’re killing legitimate terrorists.

“In some cases, we’re doing drone strikes on people and we don’t even know their identities. I’m not talking about collateral damage. I’m saying we’re actually targeting people because they’re military age males in a certain region.

“We’re declaring them terrorists and killing them as a form of pre-crime. And, to me, that’s a really toxic direction for us to be headed into.”